myself and my Creator." Most fervently he believes that

"Haply for us the ideal dawn shall break . . .
And set our pulse in tune with moods divine" --

though, co-equally, in the necessity of "making man sole sponsor of himself."
Ever and again, of course, he was betrayed by the bewildering and defiant
puzzle of life: seeing in the face of the child the seed of sorrow,
"in the green tree an ambushed flame, in Phosphor a vaunt-guard of Night."
Yet never of him could be written that thrilling saying
which Sainte-Beuve uttered of Pascal, "That lost traveller
who yearns for home, who, strayed without a guide in a dark forest,
takes many times the wrong road, goes, returns upon his steps,
is discouraged, sits down at a crossing of the roads,
utters cries to which no one responds, resumes his march with frenzy and pain,
throws himself upon the ground and wants to die, and reaches home at last
only after all sorts of anxieties and after sweating blood." No darkness,
no tempest, no gloom, long confused his vision of `the ideal dawn'.
As the carrier-dove is often baffled, yet ere long surely finds her way
through smoke and fog and din to her far country home, so he too,
however distraught, soon or late soared to untroubled ether.
He had that profound inquietude, which the great French critic says
`attests a moral nature of a high rank, and a mental nature
stamped with the seal of the archangel.' But, unlike Pascal --
who in Sainte-Beuve's words exposes in the human mind itself two abysses,
"on one side an elevation toward God, toward the morally beautiful,
a return movement toward an illustrious origin, and on the other side
an abasement in the direction of evil" -- Browning sees, believes in,
holds to nothing short of the return movement, for one and all,
toward an illustrious origin.